Humanitarians at War: The Red Cross in the Shadow of the Holocaust by Gerald Steinacher (review)

Gerald Steinacher's revealing study of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) constitutes an important addition to our understanding of the successes and failings of the world's preeminent humanitarian organization during World War II. Humanitarians at War offers a judicious analysis of an organization caught between its ideals and the reality of wartime Europe. Steinacher's examination concentrates "on the challenges faced … during the crucial years of 1944–1950 and the organization's handing of these challenges" (1). The work covers a critical period in the ICRC's history as the organization faced an existential challenge related to its actions and inactions during the war, including the ICRC's silence during the Holocaust, increased competition for the reins of power from national Red Cross committees, and a desperate effort to reclaim its humanitarian reputation after 1944.

The work is carefully researched with extensive use of archival and secondary sources. In the case of the latter, Steinacher does an admirable job including scholarship from historians and political scientists. This cross-disciplinary view is especially important for a study that encompasses the bureaucratic and organizational history of an institution with global reach and international influence. In this sense, one of the key strengths of the analysis involves Steinacher's ability to frame the competing bureaucratic pressures and political considerations involved in the operations of supranational organizations caught between their professional charters and the political objectives of their national governments. For example, the national Red Cross organizations of Sweden and the United States, like the ICRC in Switzerland, faced the real and perceptual challenge of being seen merely as extensions of their national governments. In the case of Switzerland, this was a problem exacerbated by the joint membership of serving politicians, diplomats, and government officials on the ICRC board. Likewise, Steinacher provides a detailed discussion of the role of the ICRC's presidents in dictating the actions and agenda of the organization, including Max Huber, the highly problematic Carl Jacob Burckhardt, and Paul Ruegger.

For historians of the Holocaust, the discussion of the wartime role of the ICRC and its activities with respect to prisoners of war, the concentration camps, and later efforts on behalf of refugees and Displaced Persons will be of the greatest interest. Likewise, the organization's well-known and much criticized silence on the destruction of European Jews is a key emphasis and highlights the most controversial legacy of the ICRC's wartime actions. Despite the ICRC's early knowledge of Nazi mass murder, the leadership and committee as whole, with some dissenting voices, pursued a pragmatic political course governed by realist policy considerations and made a conscious decision not to publicly expose or condemn Nazi genocide in a pivotal meeting in October 1942. This "most shameful moment" became all the more tragic and apparent when two months later the Polish government in exile and the United Nations issued their joint declaration concerning the mass murder of the Polish Jews(42). Seen in this light, the ICRC's postwar adoption of a policy of "humanity without limits," which ignored the distinction between perpetrators and victims, seems all the more inexplicable (158). This organizational volte face is even more striking when one considers the ICRC's dispatch of a medical mission to the eastern front to support Wehrmacht forces (but was prohibited from treating Soviet wounded), the manifold antisemitic sentiments expressed by Carl Burckhardt, including his testimony at Nuremberg in support of Nazi war criminals, and a postwar travel pass policy that served as a "free pass" for Nazi perpetrators and pro-Axis collaborators to escape prosecution for war crimes. In this sense, it is not surprising that ICRC's international reputation and prestige suffered after the war or that the organization faced pointed criticisms from Jewish organizations, the Soviet government, and from its national affiliates.

Steinacher details the bureaucratic and...